Pop Surrealism in Melbourne

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are filled with a passionate intensity.”

W.B. Yeats – The Second Coming

Fantastic, visionary and surreal elements have always been present in art; these strange attractors will always have artists and collectors. It exists in a cluster of other strange attractors: the exotic, the primitive, the macabre, and the comic…

What ever it is a fantastic publishing opportunity for books and magazines, prints and posters – and the galleries that sell them. Several Melbourne people have published fantastic art: in the past, Art Visionary magazine and currently, BeinArt Publishing. Melbourne has two galleries that specialize in this art: the established city gallery, Outré Gallery and, the Brunswick gallery, 696 Ink.

Outré Gallery is a commercial boutique gallery on Elizabeth St. in the Melbourne that exhibits artists like Shag, Mark Ryden and “other pop, lowbrow, street and alternative art”, according to their entry in Art Almanac. They also have a branch in Sydney. Outré Gallery is focused on American lowbrow and street art along with more than books, prints and vinyl toys. The last time that I was in Outré Gallery I saw a painted porcelain hand-grenade and other porcelain products from Laibach.

696 Ink (see my review of their opening) is a smaller gallery and although it also exhibits internationally known pop-surreal artists. There was a Robert Wilson painting on the wall when I was last in there and a young artist from the eastern suburbs was in to see a single painting by an artist that he admired. 696 Ink specializes in local artists and more affordable art. It also distributes the books of Jon Beinart, who also has a hand in the management of the gallery. BeinArt Publishing started with glossy full colour book of fantastic art, Metamorphosis, since then it has published Metamorphosis 2 and two other monographs on the work of individual fantastic artists.

Art Visionary, “Australian & International Journal of Fantastic & Visionary Art”, was an irregular publication from Melbourne, starting in 1997 and continued for 3 issues. Damian Michaels, an American artist and art collector who migrated to the suburbs of Melbourne in 1995, edited it. Art Visionary focused too much on the Viennese School of Fantastic Art, like H.R.Giger, and Wolfgang Grasse. Issue 1 started with a colour cover and black and white inside but the number of colour pages grew in later issues. There was a modest amount of advertising in the magazine from galleries from around the world including Outré Gallery.

Both Damian Michaels and Jon Beinart operate as publishers, collectors and dealers. They organize exhibitions of the artists that they represent; Jon Beinart has had exhibitions at Brunswick Arts and the old, 696. In 2001 Damian Michaels curated Fantastic Art, an exhibition mostly from his own collection of fantastic art from around the world, at Orange Regional Gallery. Later this exhibition toured Ballarat Gallery and other regional galleries. On the 23^rd of July 2004 I was at the opening of the Fantastic Art exhibition at Ballarat Gallery. About a hundred other people braved the heavy rain and icy Ballarat winter weather to see because of the variety of contemporary fantastic art. There were works by Tom McKee (US), Erik Heyninck (Belgium), Alex Grey (US), H.R. Giger (Switzerland), Ernst Fuchs (Austria), Paul Freeman (Australia) and many other artists from around the world.

There are problems with pop surrealism and its relatives; they are not innocent in its appropriation by advertising and the mass media as Hakim Bey argues (Hakim Bey TAZ Automedia 1991 p.79). It has become the most commercial of all types of art with mass edition prints and other products marketed at a variety of price levels. What else is the purpose of this art? Is it just to look strange and impressive in reproduction in books and magazines?

Advertisement

Gloves, Locks and Vali Myers

I walked around the city enjoying the spring sunshine after the rain and looking at a few small exhibitions. It looks nothing like Xmas even though they are putting up Xmas trees and other decorations around Melbourne. There is a large red Santa Mail Box in the City Square. Now that the drought is over some of Melbourne’s fountains are flowing again; the John Mockridge Fountain in the City Square is one of them. Melbourne once had fountains in its gardens and scattered around the city but during the drought they were shut off and only the NGV’s famous water wall remained flowing.

On the ground floor “artspace” at Victoria University Peter Burke is exhibiting graphite, enamel and charcoal drawings of 18 of the 55 gloves that he has found on his way to work and back. Each drawing is documented in a stamped format with the date, time and location of the glove: “Green + blue gardening glove, Saturday 10/7/10 11:35am Swanston St. Melbourne.” There are wool, leather and rubber gloves, generally singular although there is one pair. The detailed drawings of the lost gloves have an anthropomorphic quality and a concern with the wabi-sabi elements of wear. “Lost Property: Gloves” combines the conceptual, art/life/game elements of Peter Burke’s art with the fine traditional drawings.

“Unlocked – Abus photography award” at No Vacancy is an exhibition by second year RMIT photography students for a prize from Abus, a German padlock company. So most of the photographs looked liked glossy advertising photographs for their product but a few rose above this, like Hannah Schlesinger’s “Secure the Sacred”. Giles Crook won the $2000 prize and Don Dang won the people’s choice.

There is a small exhibition of visionary art by the late, eccentric bohemian, Vali Myers on exhibition at Outré Gallery. Myers’ obsessive technique of lines and dots are some kind of substitute for quality and artistic development. Along with her art there is a vitrine of her journals, jewellery and other mementos of her life, including the last pen nib that she used. I remember visiting Vali Myers studio in the Nicholas Building in the late 90s. Her single large room on the 7^th floor was a combination between a sitting room, studio and sales room. The original art is NFS (Not For Sale) but the prints are. Most of the prints are giclee prints produced by the Vali Myers Art Gallery Trust after her death.