Taree Mackenzie @ Neon Parc

Sometimes it seems that I have seen it all before, not more paintings about painting, please no more photographs of empty playgrounds, and then I see some new, amazing and beautiful art. This outstanding art is the reason why I’ve been visiting so many galleries and looking at so much average art.

It is hard to see at first. Inside Neon Parc in Brunswick it is dark except for the coloured lights of Taree Mackenzie’s art. What is going on? The set up for each piece, rotating black shapes and panels of light and glass, neatly occupies the dark corners of the gallery. The elegant symmetry and minimalist design of the mechanism that creates the images are exposed. The science is known, involving reflectivity and coloured filters removing colours, you may have even seen some of it in dinky science demonstrations but never at this scale or elegance. The optical trick may be obvious but it is so beautifully executed that I didn’t care.

Mackenzie uses a couple of basic optical effects to create simple beautiful images, ultra-modern abstract animated images. The images that exist on the glass’s surface and looking through the glass are a purely retinal art. The simplicity and minimalism of the rotating objects and primary light colours contributing to their trippy, hypnotic experience.

Mackenzie has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts and an interest in maths and science. She has a strong track record for creating installations that use simple tricks using light and colour to create abstract images. However, unlike Mackenzie’s previous exhibitions, this time her simple abstract images are mediated without the use of video cameras and monitors. For more read an interview with Mackenzie by Maura Edmond on Primer. 

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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

Openings and Closings: Brunswick Arts and Neon Parc

One gallery closes and another one opens: Brunswick Arts is closing and Neon Parc has opened a new second space.

Brunswick Arts is an artist run gallery that opened eleven years ago in a converted factory space built out the back of a suburban house. The factory space opened onto Little Breeze Street and served as an art gallery while various artists lived in the house, a key part of the gallery’s business model. However, recently building inspectors ruled it out the combination of a residence and gallery.

An opening at Brunswick Arts

“Burnt out” were two of the words used by Alister Karl, who has been on the committee running Brunswick Arts for at least a decade. To keep doing the same thing and hoping for different results is a sign of madness. You don’t have to keep on going, you can change.

The new Neon Parc second space on Tinning Street in Brunswick does not look like much from the outside, just another warehouse, but the detail of the name embossed door handle indicates of what is coming. Inside is an elegant white walled space for exhibiting contemporary art without compromise.

Dale Frank exhibition at Neon Parc

The current exhibition of sweet and shiny works by Dale Frank would have been impossible in Neon Parc’s small city space. Big and shiny, sweet and sticky are the aesthetics that Frank is playing with, or rigorously pursuing through variations. Basically what you can put, pour, smears, sticks and hangs in a camp parody of modernism on a shiny sheet of perspex. Complete with neo-baroque theatrical flourishes of the black frames and the white chocolate fountain.

Geoff Newton, the director of Neon Parc has lived in Brunswick for decades. Newton said that he was a bit worried about getting collectors in Melbourne’s south to cross the Yarra to see a gallery in Brunswick, instead he has collectors from Essendon visiting the gallery.

Neon Parc joins Tinning Street Presents… the first art gallery on the street along with artists studios and other creative endeavours. Tinning Street in Brunswick is becoming an artistic centre in Brunswick. Turning Tinning Street into a cul-de-sac by blocked off rail-crossing to cars has given some kind of character to the former industrial area dominated by two grain silos. The silos and Ilham Lane off Tinning Street are good street art and graffiti areas.

Galleries have opened and closed in Brunswick before; read my post A Hipster Conversion.

DAMP @ Neon Parc

Why break ceramic objects (vases, plates, statues, a bathroom sink)? Why paint them with acrylic paint with references to the whole of art history (ancient Greeks to modern masters, including Picasso’s Weeping Woman) and then glue them back together again with polymer adhesive (as best as possible, given that some pieces might go missing in the process)?

Why? I was just re-reading an essay by Arthur Danto on this very subject; “Fine art and functional objects” (Danto, Embodied Meanings, critical essays and aesthetic meditations, 1994). Danto looks at an ancient Greek krater from the sixth century BCE, by the potter Euxitheos, decorated with red-figure paintings by Euphronius and considers the way that the art is now seen, as it is on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as separate from the function. Danto points out that until the eighteenth century, “the distinction between painting and decoration was all bout nonexistent, and pictures were thought of as functional objects as well”. (p.300)

Danto concludes that the distinction between fine art and functionality is “historically contingent and constantly under negotiation.” (p.303) Clearly for this exhibition negotiations had broken down. In negotiating the functionality of the ceramic objects DAMP had broken them to remove their functionality. However, attempting to separate the art from its support is impossible.

Breaking the ceramics reduces their value to almost nothing, they are then transformed into art; a routine practiced by Japanese Buddhist monks, as well as, DAMP.

I walked two or three times around the “Harrison Collection” of painted ceramics by DAMP in the small single room of Neon Parc, chuckling to myself. There were plenty of details to keep looking. DAMP is a Melbourne-based art collective with a fluid membership that started in 1995.

Barry Keldoulis is Fucked

Last week Geoff Newton had a small exhibition of Paul Yore’s textile work at his Melbourne gallery, Neon Parc. Yore’s work reminded me of the art of English Turner Prize-winning artist, Chris Ofili for there is the same intensity, insanity and psychedelic intensity of both of their vision complete with sequins and vibrant colours. It was a chance for Melbourne to see it before the work was due to go up to Sydney for the Sydney Contemporary, Sydney’s new international art fair.

Paul Yore, “Fountain of Knowledge”, 2013

Then a few hours before its VIP preview Sydney Contemporary announced that it would not be showing Paul Yore’s work. Sydney Contemporary’s Director Barry Keldoulis made the following statement: “Sydney Contemporary supports artists and their practice, but we respect and work within the laws of the jurisdiction. Our decision with regard to the installation is a about the law of the land and they are on the wrong side of it. When we saw the work we recognised the issues and sought legal advice which confirmed the work offends various relevant provisions in the Crimes Act Legislation in NSW. We regret having had to make the decision but have no doubt it’s in the best interests of all the artists and galleries showing at Sydney Contemporary 13.”

Keldoulis’s statement is overly definite (“no doubt”, “they are on the wrong side of it”) and at the same time vague (“various relevant provisions”). It implies that nobody at Sydney Contemporary had seen Paul Yore’s work before (very unlikely) and that censorship is “in the best interests of all the artists and galleries showing” (again very unlikely). We don’t know what issues Keldoulis “recognized” and why these same issues were not recognized when Paul Yore exhibited the some of the same work at Neon Parc, Ballart Art Gallery or the Melbourne Art Fair.

The Crimes Act in NSW does refer to “blasphemous libel” but that was last successfully prosecuted in 1871. Blasphemy is not in the Crimes Act of Victoria and this might explain why there was no police raid on Neon Parc or the Ballart Art Gallery when one of the works removed from Sydney Contemporary was exhibited there. (Not that the Victoria Police regularly attend art galleries to check – they only do that when prompted by right wing scum.) I’m sure that Paul Yore’s work “Fountain of Knowledge” could be regarded as blasphemous libel (if you wanted to) but that would need to be proven in court. Keldoulis is libellous in claiming that there is “no doubt” that Paul Yore’s art is criminal.

P.S. (20/9/13) Subsequent to publishing this blog post Keldoulis provided some degree of clarification as to what part of Crimes Act he was referring to. NSW has laws about the depiction of children. Arts Law website states: “As at 1 March 2013, genuine artistic purpose is no longer a defence to the offences of production, dissemination, and possession of material that depicts children pornographically.” Under this yet untested law “pornographically” is defined very broadly as “in a sexual context”.

P.S. (29/9/13) Keldoulis and his legal team also removed the work of Queensland artist Tyza Stewart. Do the directors of art fairs normally tour the yet to be opened fair with a barrister to check if the art is legal? Or is Australia or Keldoulis abnormal?

P.S. (2/12/15) To be fair to Keldoulis you can read his response my questions in a blog post: Censorship, Barry Keldoulis and Paul Yore. To be fair to Paul Yore in 2013 the Australian Classification Board classified Yore’s  installation, Everything is Fucked as “Classification 1, Restricted, suitable for people over the age of 18” meaning that it is definitely not as Keldoulis maintained illegal.

Like Mike

The exhibition, “Like Mike” pays homage to Australian artist Mike Brown (1938 – 1997) and looks at his diverse influence on other local artists. The National Gallery of Victoria had a Mike Brown retrospective in 1995 but a retrospective can only look back but an artist like Mike Brown also has an impact on the future. “Like Mike” is more of a prospective exhibition. And given the variety of art that Mike Brown created it needs to be a diverse exhibition.

It is a very ambitious exhibition that spreads across five Melbourne galleries: Neon Parc, Sarah Scout, Utopian Stumps, Charles Nordrum Galleries and the Linden Centre of Contemporary Art. And features the work of 33 emerging and established artists along with some work by Mike Brown.

The overall curator for this massive exhibition is Geoff Newton. I asked Newton why Mike Brown? “The practice has so much going for it in freedom of expression,” he replied. Newton is an incisive critic of his own work pointing out the holes in the exhibition. There is no graffiti, a major omission when Mike Brown was painting the walls of Fitzroy long before the current generation of street artists. And there are no indigenous artists represented.

The 100 page catalogue is an extensive work in itself, featuring images from the artists involved in the exhibition along with a bit of text. Geoff Newton said that he wanted the catalogue to be image heavy unlike the book by art historian Richard Haese, Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997, (Miegunyah Press, 2011)

I saw some of the exhibition Neon Parc, Sarah Scout and Utopian Stumps. I was unable to see the Linden Centre of Contemporary Art because they had shut their doors without explanation after the police raid on Saturday 1st of June (see my post Police Raid Gallery).

Neon Parc has an all women show, giving a feminine perspective on Mike Brown’s influence, with an intense hanging of 30+ works in the small gallery.

The exhibition at Sarah Scout looks at the body and references to pornography. It features familiar work by Pat and Richard Larter and, for me, the unfamiliar work of Claire Lambe and Nell.

Utopian Stumps takes on Mike Brown’s interest in abstraction. I particularly enjoyed seeing the work of John Nixon in this context.

These exhibitions provided both a deeper understanding of Mike Brown’s work and his current influence in Australian art. Ireverant, irritating and diverse… like Mike.