Can George Brandis paint?

Let’s hope he can. Because if he gets his way there may soon be a a lot of bare gallery walls around Australia waiting for someone to fill them. In a petulant response to the recent withdrawal of the Sydney Biennale from a sponsorship deal with Transfield, Brandis, Minister for the Arts in Tony Abbott’s government, has directed the Australia Council for the Arts to find ways of financially punishing a funding recipient who "unreasonably refuse(s) private sector funding, or … terminate(s) an existing funding agreement with a private partner”.

The Minister’s dummy-spit is a reaction to the Sydney Biennale controversy when a number of high-profile Australian and international artists said they were withdrawing from the Biennale because of the sponsorship deal with Transfield, a company that has business interests in running Australia’s refugee detention camps on behalf of the Abbott government. So if the Australia Council now introduces a requirement for its funded companies and projects to accept private sponsorship irrelevant of the ethical concerns of artists, we may soon see events such as the Sydney Biennale taking place with seriously curtailed artist roll calls. Many contemporary artists hold their political and ethical views quite strongly. There are few who ascribe to Brandis’ art-for-art’s sake worldview. And let’s be honest, most high-profile international artists do not need the Sydney Biennale (or similar Australian arts events) as much as it needs them. A 2016 Sydney Biennale with installation work by George Brandis as the main attraction is probably not what many people want. Even Branids as conceptual artist is unlikely to get many punters through the doors.

Image: Matthias Blume

Art that moves ...

Yesterday I saw Berlinde De Bruyckere's exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne. Titled We are all Flesh, the show is exceptionally moving and even subtly disconcerting. It left a much stronger impression on me than many more overtly and intentionally "disturbing" shows.

I left the show thinking that the art that gets past our intellectual sensors, emotional barriers and filters is often the art which resists the temptation to do just that. In a post-modern world in which to say that art attempts to shake our complacencies is a trite and cliched truism and in which work that goes out of its way to do do seems to be everywhere, this show was a welcome reminder that art that works primarily in its own terms is still often the best art.

Self-immolation in gold leaf

Pop music has been eating itself for the last few decades. The world of the visual arts is catching up quicker than you can read another curator's catalogue essay about the glory days of Vienna and the beginnings of modernism. The world's great galleries and museums never seem to tire of raking over the coals of the Klimt-Schiele-Hoffmann-Freud-Mahler complex in search of yet another way to present the ever-fascinating "beginnings of modernism".

The Austrian Belvedere Gallery in Vienna is the latest contributor to the all-too-familiar pantheon of exhibitions in the "fin de siècle Vienna" genre. Under the imaginative title "Klimt / Hoffmann, Pioneers of Modernism" the Belvedere is currently running an exhibition that yet again tries to breathe life into this old war horse.

This year is the 150th anniversary of Gustav Klimt's birth and no doubt the Belvedere is only one of numerous galleries around the world that will be cashing in on the event. There is certainly plenty of money to be made out of Klimt's big gold masterpieces. What a pity it is that there is so little new to be said about them.

Self-immolation in gold leaf promises to be the most appropriate title for much of the coming year on the international art exhibition circuit.

Modernism: art's suicide?

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I was at an exhibition a few weeks back. The question the curator wanted to tackle was whether modernism had "murdered art". If so, it would, of course, be a case of suicide. After all, it was modernist artists who confronted their predecessors and, if the thesis is right, ushered in an Oedipal tearing down of earlier understandings of what art is.

The core of the curatorial position was that "Modern art ... opposed everything associated with representation and replaced it with reality." Central to the idea was the arrival of Marcel Duchamp's Ready Mades. Artists such as Duchamp, so the argument went, were no longer seeking to "represent" reality. Instead they were creating it.

The argument has its merits. But it misses the target in some subtle ways. In particular, it overlooks the ways in which the context in which art is experienced remove an object from "reality" and make it into art. When Duchamp displays a bicycle wheel or an upturned urinal in an art museum they do not have the same "reality" as such objects outside the museum. The museum denudes them of their previous "realities". A bicycle wheel in an art museum is not a bicycle wheel. Even if the artist has done very little to transform such a Ready Made, the context does the work and turns it into art. That is the social function of art institutions. Remnants of the original, intrinsic "reality" remain, but to view such Ready Mades as "reality" rather than "depictions" underplays the social and cultural function of the institutional in the arts

In the Führer's footsteps

I was in Munich the other day. I went to see the Haus der Kunst (House of Art). This is a large art museum that is now home to contemporary exhibitions. When I was there, there was a show by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. But what I really wanted to see was the building itself. It was built under the Nazis in the late 1930s and survived the war more or less intact. Hitler intended it to be the new home for German art. In his mad world German art would be freed of Modernist influences and the art of jews, Communists and anybody else he didn't approve of. And this museum was to be the new home to this ideologically cleansed German art. It was an embarassment to the Nazis that the exhibition of works by the banned, so-called "degenerate" artists (everybody that Hitler didn't like) was more popular than that of the officially approved new German artists who were shown here at the Haus der Kunst.

Nazi ideology placed considerable importance on the arts. For those artists prepared to tow the party line (and with the required racial profile), the Nazis were good for business. Hitler himself was an artist of sorts and was keen to open the new museum himself when it was finished in 1938. There is a well-known photo of him delivering his speech to a bevy of luminaries in this very building. The building has changed very little since then. The monumental pillars of Nazi architecture are all there, the megalomania is still very present. It is not hard to find the exact spot where the Führer stood to delivery his speech and his views on arts policy. It is still somehow an eerie experience, standing in the footsteps of the most "evil" man in history. Europe is, of course, full of traces from Hitler and the Nazis, but for me at least, this was the first time I had stood in the same spot where he stood and delivered one of his withering speeches. It was a sobering moment indeed.

Photo: Adolf Hitler opens the Haus der Kunst with a speech in the main hall. The hall still looks much the same today.

Francis Bacon's 100th birthday

This week - 28 October to be precise - was the 100th birthday of the British painter Francis Bacon. He was a driven man whose uncompromising, energetic and powerful pictures matched his famously tragic and extreme lifestyle. Bacon was the most important painter in Britain during the 1960s and 70s. His big, powerful canvases demand the viewer's attention and never leave you untouched or ambivalent. At a time when abstraction was all the rage, Bacon - a more-or-less self-taught artist - pushed the figurative to its boundaries and with it the human form. Almost all of Bacon's works focus on one or two people and he had a fascination for the human mouth and the body in motion. The gaping mouths of the Pope pictures he painted during the 1950s spectacularly reflect his oral fixation. Based on Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), these are some of the best known Bacons. His predilection for the body in motion was fostered by Muybridge's 1887 book The Human Figure in Motion. David Sylvester's book Interviews with Francis Bacon is still one of the best books on twentieth century painting. One thing is for sure about Bacon's paintings, you won't find many on corporate boardroom walls! And that is a good thing.

Happy Birthday Francis Bacon!

Check out the Tate's recent Bacon show here: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/francisbacon/

Callum Morton's Valhalla

Callum Morton’s walk-through sculpture work Valhalla is installed outside the Victorian Arts Centre in Melbourne until 24 October. It was originally commissioned for the 2007 Venice Biennale and the current installation is its first in Australia.

The piece is a three-quarter scale model inspired by a house designed by Morton’s architect father. The outside of the two-story building is derelict, grey and vandalised, the windows are boarded up. But when you go up the steps and enter you find yourself in the shiny, tiled interior of a lift-foyer of the type that occurs in contemporary office and apartment blocks around the world. It is spotlessly clean. The cleaner’s bucket and mop sit in a corner.

Located on a busy thoroughfare in central Melbourne, the exhibition attracts its fair share of tourists, lunchtime strollers and visitors to the nearby National Gallery of Victoria.

It is a work that moves the artistic experience into the heart of the viewer. The three-quarter scale is disconcerting as you stand in front of the three faceless and soulless elevator openings wondering if they are going to open. Morton’s work is superficially simple and uncomplicated. You soon realise that the drama takes place in your own reaction to the space, not in the space and the building itself. As you stand there, uncomfortably close to the ceiling you notice the confused reactions of your anonymous companions. The grungy exterior of the building has led you to expect some sort of hard-hitting commentary on this or that aspect of contemporary life. But the piece is anything but didactic. The rumbling noises emanating from the bowels of the building are portentous. But the terror never materialises. Except in our inner-most fears.

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Barbed wire and cuckoo clocks

In November 2009 it will be twenty years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain that separated West and East Germany for forty years. Germany is gearing up for various commemorative events to remember the victims of the Communist regime in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly known as East Germany.

One of the most ambitious projects is an exhibition called Art of the Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (Kunst und Kalter Krieg / Deutsche Positionen 1945 - 1989). Curated by Stephanie Barron, Senior Curator of Modern Art, LACMA and Dr. Eckhart Gillen, Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH, the touring show started at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and next opens on 5 October in Berlin at the Deutsches Historisches Musuem.

For most of the Cold War and the twenty years since its end it has been customary to see the ultimate failure of East Germany as an indictment of its political and economic systems. It was also widely assumed that this failure could be directly transferred to the culture of East Germany. Surely the work of artists living under a Communist dictatorship would be inferior to that of their colleagues who enjoyed the artistic freedoms that existed in liberal democracies. For most of the last two decades since the West got unfettered access to the art of East Germany that certainly seemed to be the assumption. The Art of Two Germanys exhibition now goes some way to reassessing such crude assumptions. The interplay between political systems and artists is rarely straight forward. Orson Welles in the film The Third Man (see last blog) put it nicely if a little cynically:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

p.s. Those lines are not the work of Graham Greene, who wrote the story of the Third Man. Orson Welles added them while shooting the film.

© Brian Long 2009