Melbourne Art Fair Cancelled

In 1988 the “First Australian Contemporary Art Fair” was held at the Royal Exhibition Building. It was the year of the bicentennial and the new art fair was presented by the Australian Commercial Galleries Association and the Bicentennial Authority. Since then, every two years, the Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) has been held in the Royal Exhibition Building. Now it is over, not with a bang but a whimper of an announcement.

Melbourne Art Fair 2014 at the Exhibition Building

The announcement of the cancellation from Anna Pappas, chair of the not-for-profit  MAF came on Friday 19 2016. Art Guide and The Age scrambled to publish this major story that day. The Guardian waited until it had discovered who the “high-profile galleries” that Pappas referred to in her statement. The Age had made an informed guess that this might include Diane Tanzer Gallery, but this proved not to be the case. Melbourne may not have an art fair any more but it does have more than one major commercial art gallery.

There are still many unanswered questions about the cancelled art fair. Is this the beginning of a trend or just one of the common variety of administrative debacle?

Suggesting that the cancelation of art was due to an administrative debacle is the fact that in August 2015 the MAF had severed its contract to manage the fair with Art Fairs Australia. If that is the case then we can expect that MAF will be re-established in a couple of years.

However, there are reasons to think that it is the start of a trend away from the art fair model. Barry Keldoulis told the media at the opening of the MAF 2014 that “art fairs may not be the best way to see art but they are the best way to see hell of lot of art.” If art fairs are not be the best way to see art why would they be the best way to buy art or sell art. Although art fairs were promoted as the mega-art market there are serious commercial art galleries in Melbourne who have done the math and decided that the MAF is not worth it.

Considering the last MAF two years ago in hindsight I should have been spending more time at the Not Fair rather than the MAF. Not Fair was the alternative satellite to the MAF. It was curated exhibition in Collingwood at 12 Peel Street and The Grace Darling Hotel. Its curators, Sam Leach, Ashley Crawford and Rebecca Richards had put together an exhibition that has been mentioned more times to me in the last two years than the MAF.

The loss of the MAF is not a disaster for Australian art. Australian art has changed so much in the three decades since the art fair started. Looking at the 1988 art fair catalogue Patrick McCaughey’s introductory essay about the Australian art in the eighties was about a contemporary art scene that had just emerged. In the 1988 art fair where there was only 21 galleries involved. Of the Melbourne galleries that were exhibiting in 1988 only Australian, Niagara and Tolarno galleries are still operating. Tolarno Galleries is one of the galleries whose non-participation this year ended the MAF.

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bLOGOS/HA HA

Peter Tyndall’s blog, bLOGOS/HA HA is blogging as contemporary art; there is always an enjoyable conjuncture of images on it and it forms part of his greater work. In 2013 bLOGOS/HA HA was in the NGV’s Melbourne Now and Reinventing the Wheel; the Readymade Century at MUMA. I’m pleased to see it represented in exhibitions where it is displayed in physical (paper) and virtual (computer) forms. I’ve had bLOGOS/HA HA on my blogroll for years.

Adrian Featherston’s photo looks at Peter Tyndall at Monash 1975

Tyndall was my first local favourite contemporary artists when I was an undergraduate at Monash Uni. Tyndall was the first artist-in-residence at Patrick McCaughey’s brand new Dept of Visual Arts at Monash Uni. I was impressed that in the mid 1970s he had retrospectively retitled all his art the same title:

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something…

This title was often accompanied by a schematic representation of the painting, a square with wire hangers (the hanging system of the galleries at the time) and a viewer, generally a family standing in front of it.

In the 1980s Tyndall had refined his title further adding, a line space as in the chorus of a song and then, what Tyndall refers to as the “meta-Title”,  LOGOS/HA HA in upper case. Tyndall played with his “meta-Title” in the title of his blog; considering the entomology of ‘logos’ and ‘web logs’ (as blogs were originally called).

There is a poetry to Tyndall’s title and repeating image. It is part of the post-modern experience, the endless quotation, the paradoxes, the hermeneutical elements building up meaning through repetition. Combining the conceptual and the visual in a sophisticated post-modern understanding of the image and communication.

Tyndall works in all media and his blog is a hyperlinked extension of this exploration of media. Blogging appears like the ideal for Tyndall’s art. Is bLOGOS/HA HA in one media or multimedia? This is the kind of links, interconnections, indeterminacy and paradoxes that Tyndall delights in.

Blogging presents another paradox to Tyndall, the private and the public. His art never expressed the private individual; all that the Melbourne Now exhibition guide notes “1951 – :born at Mercy Hospital, Melbourne, The World”. Tyndall reconciles this by posts on exhibitions, current events and protests in the art world (I learnt about the protests about no sketching at the NGV from his blog and wrote my own blog post). This is mixed with posts on Tyndall’s own exploration of repeating images of people looking at things, including art.

Communicating is at the core of Tyndall’s art and blogging. His writing is crisp and his choice of images to accompany the blog posts are inspired. His obsessions and his visual memory of interconnected images are perfect to display on the internet. As he explained in an email: “In daily practice, I observe that my present inclination is less to the slow and expensive means of the easel and more to the immediate, inexpensive and intuitive exploration via the digital projection-space. I do, each day, still make some things more-or-less in the traditional means, but usually quickly: drawings, collages, postcards, words, photos.” Tyndall thinks that more artists should blog to communicate, create, and exhibit commenting: “I’m surprised how few ‘struggling artists’ give themselves this easy opportunity.”

The size of his blog, built up by incremental additions over the years since 2008 (the same year that I started this blog), makes it Tyndall’s largest detail in his life’s work. It’s size is a matter of duration and it is as endless as Tyndall’s art mantra:

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something…

 

LOGOS/HA HA